


Gerasene

by Winterphoenix



Category: The Exorcist (TV)
Genre: M/M, Other, Post Season 2
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-01-09
Updated: 2018-01-09
Packaged: 2019-03-02 12:57:14
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 2
Words: 1,652
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13318590
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Winterphoenix/pseuds/Winterphoenix
Summary: Marcus answers God's calling and finds he's too late.





	1. Chapter 1

"Tomas, can you hear me?"

The panic is cold steel, thick and uncompromising. It twists his screws tighter and tighter and winds him up like a clockwork mouse with its eyes poked out.

Tomas' eyes, in life, are full of Latin charm and lighty, flighty energy, the same shade of hazel-brown as Mouse's yet bridled with something more, some glimmer, some light, some little pinprick of energy that makes him human.

"Tomas, I need you to wake up."

His life is on rotate. He's said those words before. 

"Wake up!"

"For God's sake, Marcus, do you think I've not tried calling his name?"

If Tomas is warmth and fulfilment, Mouse is a chasm of cold, hard barrenness. His smile is thousand tiny glimmers of sunlight bouncing off her broken lake of ice. Marcus can’t crack the glass of Mouse's face; can’t shatter the barriers erected around every last bit of warmth she has left.

She is as lost as she ever was to him and the years have taken a chisel to her spirit and left only a shell of it behind. 

"He hasn't been awake for 3 days, Marcus. We're out of time. If it integrates, you know what we have to do. There's no greater prize than an exorcist."

No! Those are the words he cannot hear, will not hear. They are as blasphemous to Marcus as the Lord's name being scraped across derelict mouths. 

"As long as I'm capable of screaming the words of the book out loud, they'll not have him. Do you understand me?"

If she is the soul Marcus could never save, Tomas is the soul he can never let go of. She stares at him for a little too long and he knows what she is thinking: 

_You let them have me. You left me to the wolves and had someone else pick up the shards of my soul and put me back together again. You were capable of screaming for me but you took your voice and you abandoned me to silence._

They say that rejection is the greatest aphrodisiac but it's envy that steals the life from even the strongest of men and women. Mouse envies Tomas more than she could ever care to admit. Perhaps that's why she used him. Broke him. It's only by the grace of God that Marcus has found him alive.

"I could've helped him if you'd called me. It might not have come to this."

"You lost the right to consultation when you left him. Look at him now, Marcus. Look at what you left behind."

"Oh, I'm looking. I don't recognise what I'm seeing. I kept him whole. I kept him _safe,_ Mouse."

"You kept him tethered." 

"Rather that than this." 

In this quasi-death, Tomas is dormant. He is laden. He is clay, his face unmoving, chiselled and carved in view of inexplicable beauty yet inexpressive and devoid of spark and life. His eyes are the dimmest shade of white, his skin soft gold turned to ash. He is wooden. He is hollow. He is Pinocchio. He does not move his face, his mouth, does not crack to smile. 

He is wax. 

He is wax as Marcus waxes lyrical, aching in the petrified knowledge of what might have been had he not left him alone with a woman whose spirit he lost all those years ago. 

How could she do this? 

"I knew this would happen," he whispers, and his tongue is a razor blade that cuts him with every word. "If he truly is a bomb then you've handed him to the enemy with the pin removed. Are you happy, now?" 

If he pushes hard he might find a soul in the chasm that she has become, a little corner of heat in this body and soul that's as cold as a snowdrift. She doesn't thaw. 

"His eyes were open. His gift was from God. We serve as we are chosen to serve. After we opened our doors to him, Tomas' choice was his own." 

Coercion isn't consent. Surely she must know that. You cannot twist a man's arm until the bone breaks the heart of the skin and say the choice was made freely. He smiles a great-white smile and there's nothing but bitterness in it. 

"He was never a person to you or the church, was he? He was just a means to an end." 

"That's not true." 

"Isn't it?" 

He's not a person at all, now. His eyes paint twin pupils where the whites once where and, for the first time in 72 hours, he shows signs of life, if you could call it that. Life, in living death. His back arches as far as the leather straps will let it and he laughs when his joints click, like the broken bones of a baby bird. There is a fallen angel flying without wings where there was once only a man and he is taut, he is bow-strung and he is _strong._

In some twisted, malevolent irony, the demon takes hold of Tomas on Good Friday. 

For Marcus, all Hell breaks loose. 


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The demon(s) take hold.

"You cannot say that you were not warned."

The shadows have always threatened and loomed over an illustrious past of clerical success and put the future in shade. Men of Christ are the victims of their own history. Overpowered by it. They’re burdened by the constant change that’s undermining their game.

"Oh, Marcus," the Tomas-thing says in a sickening facsimile of pity and concern, "you were doing so well until he came along. Then it all fell apart. He's a very beautiful man, we'll give you that."

It licks Tomas' beautiful lips and Mouse has to hold him back. 

"Does it anger you we entered him before you could?"

"Shut up."

"Your little cock hardened for the first time in years when you held him against the wall in that graveyard for priests. Did you think he didn't feel it?" 

There’s a spanner in Marcus Keane's works, or it could be a wrench. It goes by the moniker of Tomas Ortega, and he’s pretty sure it’s dividing him like cells in a cancerous system.

"What's the matter? Did we hit a nerve?"

It did. They did. 

"Tell me your name," he says, as he fights hard to grasp back the control.

"My name is Legion, for we are many, and we're all taking our turn with him. The most bittersweet thing about his gift from your God is that he can't tell it isn't real."

Marcus reels back - and punches the demon in Tomas' jaw.

The blood on his beautiful face is real enough. 

\---------

It goes on for hours and there is no sign of Tomas underneath the layers of filth the demon covers him in. Tomas is glory where the creature is grime. Tomas is light. Tomas is revered. This fallen angel is not loved. 

"In the name of the Father - "

"Your daddy wasn't good to you, was he?  
Poor Marky Boy, nothing but a toe rag. He wished he had pulled out the night you were conceived. Left you as nothing more than a stain on your mother's pillow."

"The Son -"

"And, poor Tomas, cast out like an unwanted dog because Papa thought he looked more like someone _else's_ son. His mother couldn't keep her _piernas_ closed."

"The Holy Ghost - "

"You are haunted by all of your failures, Keane. So is she. And, so is he. How's that for a Holy Ghost?"

Marcus falters where he stands. Mouse's body is small but her resolve is impressive as she screams on the spot. 

"I cast you out, demon!"

Tomas' sunlight laugh sounds like sawdust on the demon's tongue. 

"I'd like to see you try, little church mouse. We're still in you now. We never left."

When Marcus flicks the holy water at the jeering, sneering face he prays that, wherever he is hiding, Tomas doesn't feel the burn. 

"Leave this servant of the Lord. Be gone."

The creature arches its back but it's Tomas' voice that screams his name in pleading, bleeding agony. 

It's the first sign they've had that he's there at all. 

\----

The church teaches blind faith to priests and exorcists.

In the path to enlightenment, you climb those steps and you apply a black sock to your eyes, tied at the back of your head like a makeshift blindfold. You stand there, in darkness, and you wait. You wait until you’re given the all-clear, and then you fall. You wait for your brothers to catch you. Blind trust and faith is the point because how are you supposed to lead a congregation if you wouldn’t die for your faith?

_Tomas would put Marcus back together, if ever he cracked. He's been a glue Marcus didn't think he needed since the day he met him._

Tomas had climbed to the top of the pedestal and had waited at the top to throw himself off it. A false suicide; a bird with no wings. Marcus hadn't been there to catch him yet the demon caught him in a warped, falsified embrace. 

There’s exigency (”you're too late, father, he's ours now”), and there’s desperation (”I can feel him giving in"), but more than that there is determination. 

Marcus bleeds from his nose as the pressure builds. Cold, hard Mouse feels warm as she touches him, a rusted anchor with its chain twisted. 

"Listen to me, Marcus. You must not sacrifice yourself for him. You're not Jesus Christ."

No, he's not. He was never a favoured servant of the Lord and he often feels that God never embraced him as a son - but Tomas has been chosen. God has laid claim to this man and He has said his name and that's as close to Jesus Christ as Marcus has ever come across. 

Ashes to ashes, dust to dust, he will die before he lets him down. 

"You watch me."


End file.
